Barbara Maseda is on a John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship project at Stanford University, where she is working on designing text processing solutions for journalists. In a special guest post she explains what she’s found so far — and why she needs your help.

Over the last few months, I have been talking to journalists about their trials and tribulations with textual sources, trying to get as detailed a picture as possible of their processes, namely:

how and in what format they obtain the text,

how they find newsworthy information in the documents,

using what tools,

for what kinds of stories,

…among other details.

What I’ve found so far is fascinating: from tech-savvy reporters who write their own code when they need to analyze a text collection, to old-school investigative journalists convinced that printing and highlighting are the most reliable and effective options — and many shades of approaches in between. Continue reading “What do journalists do with large amounts of text?”→

This week I’m rounding off the first semester of classes on the new MA in Data Journalism with a session on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. Machine learning is a subset of AI — and an area which holds enormous potential for journalism, both as a tool and as a subject for journalistic scrutiny.

Today I will be introducing my MA Data Journalism students to SQL (Structured Query Language), a language used widely in data journalism to query databases, datasets and APIs.

I’ll be partly using the mapping tool Carto as a way to get started with SQL, and thought I would share my tutorial here (especially as since its recent redesign the SQL tool is no longer easy to find).

MA Data Journalism students Carmen Aguilar Garcia and Victoria Oliveres attended the Information is Beautiful awards this week and spoke to some of the nominees and winners. In a guest post for OJB they give a rundown of the highlights, plus insights from data visualisation pioneers Nadieh Bremer, Duncan Clark and Alessandro Zotta.

A few weeks ago I posted a list of 9 great newsletters about data. The post generated so many suggestions of other newsletters that I thought I’d gather them together in a follow-up post. So, here are 9 more newsletters about data journalism, data science, and data visualisation.

1. Graphic Content

Graphic Content is a regular email newsletter — and Tumblr blog — from the head of data and transparency at the Institute for Government, Gavin Freeguard.

The format is simple: a collection of lists to some of the most interesting data visualisation, data journalism and ‘meta data’ (other links about data) that day. You can subscribe to the newsletter here.

2. Hacks/Hackers

Hacks/Hackers is a global network of meetups for journalists (hacks) and developers (hackers) interested in the potential of data for newsgathering and storytelling.

3. Best in Visual Storytelling

Rachel Schallom emailed to let me know about her weekly visual journalism newsletter Best in Visual Storytelling, “which isn’t 100% about data, but includes a ton of data-driven projects.” It arrives on Mondays. The sign-up form is here.

4. Data Elixir

The first of four newsletters suggested by Jeremy Singer-Vine, whose newsletter Data Is Plural featured in the original post, Data Elixir is “a weekly newsletter of curated data science news and resources from around the web” on Tuesdays, from Lon Riesberg. It’s already passed 150 issues.

6. Data & Society

Data & Society is a research institute “focused on the social and cultural issues arising from data-centric technological development.”

If you’re interested in the more critical/academic side of data journalism, their newsletter provides updates on their research, events, and other useful links.

7. The Data Science Community newsletter

NYU’s Center for Data Sciencepublishes its own newsletter focused on the data science community and “featuring data science news delivered with humor & snark plus an always popular Tweet of the Week”. The emphasis here is on breadth with lots of detail on each link.

8. data.world Data Digest

Gabriela Swider from data.world – a new platform for sharing and analysing data – got in touch to recommend their Data Digest, which highlights a few of the most interesting datasets on the platform every Friday. Subscribe here.

9. Naked Data

And rounding off the list on a high is Jason Norwood-Young’s newsletter Naked Data — recommended by Anastasia Valeeva. “Sign up for a weekly roundup of the best data journalism projects, news, tech and happenings from around the world,” promises the sign up page. There’s a lot here beyond the usual suspects, and it’s well curated.

If you know of any newsletters not mentioned here or in the previous post, please let me know!

We’ve managed to pack in networked data journalism and investigations, automation and the internet of things, and some practical sessions too, with my new MA Data Journalism students pitching in to help.

Tickets are available here including early bird and afternoon-only options, but you’ll need to be quick — the event sold out last year.

Here’s more detail on the running order…

Networked data journalism

Kicking off the day is Megan Lucero who has been leading the Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s project Bureau Local.

And Karrie Kehoe will be speaking about how she works on computational investigations at the Irish broadcaster RTÉ.

Automation and factchecking

Two more recipients of funding from the Google Digital News Initiative are speaking in the afternoon. Urbs Media CEO Alan Renwick has worked with publishers such as Thomson Regional Newspapers, Mirror Group, TES and DMGT, and was Strategy Director at regional group Local World.

Joining them will be CW Anderson, the editor of the book Remaking The News, currently working on a forthcoming book about data journalism, and former Guardian media and technology reporter Mercedes Bunz, co-author of ‘The Internet of Things‘.

Hands-on sessions

We’ll have practical sessions at different points in the day, with attendees invited to nominate skills they would like covered.

Trinity Mirror data journalist Rob Grant will be doing a session on R for journalists and I’ll be doing a session on handling big data, based on a story that involved analysing 37 million rows of crime data.

The Telegraph was behind one of the biggest data journalism stories of the last decade

As part of the new MA in Data Journalism we have partnered with a number of organisations who are keen to bring data journalism expertise into their newsroom.

I am now inviting applications from people who want to work with The Telegraph during their MA in Data Journalism at Birmingham City University.

The Telegraph has a long history of data journalism, most famously breaking a series of stories around MPs’ expenses in 2009. Examples of its data journalism – ranging from sport and politics to text analysis and data video – can be found in its TeleGraphs section.

The news organisation is looking for applicants who are interested in developing the ability to clean and analyse data to find interesting stories; an awareness of tools that you can use to source and scrape data; and a knowledge of data visualisation in order to communicate your stories. Successful applicants will learn these skills on the MA course and have the opportunity to apply them in collaboration with The Telegraph.

They say:

“Data journalism at The Telegraph is about uncovering stories in data that people wouldn’t have otherwise known. Whether this is through scrutinising the day’s news to see what relevant data we can add to the story, or through longer investigations and analysis, data-driven reporting involves sourcing, cleaning, analysing and communicating data to tell interesting, innovative and important stories.

“We are here to provide exclusive analysis of complex, structured data with a view to finding the news stories within it and presenting it in compelling visual – as well as textual – ways. We want to see the same in data journalism students. They should be confident in figuring out solid news lines in data and knowing the best ways to visually communicate them.

If you are interested, please apply through the course webpage on the Birmingham City University website, specifying in your supporting statement that you are specifically interested in working with The Telegraph.

Please also indicate why you would be interested in working with the team, and what kind of stories you’d be interested in working on.